Four months after the biggest change to private renting in England in three decades, the paperwork is where the risk now sits. Any tenancy agreement still built on a template written before 1 May 2026 is not simply out of date — several of its standard clauses no longer do anything, and one missing document carries a civil penalty of up to £7,000.
One tenancy type, and no fixed terms
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 took effect on 1 May 2026 and abolished the assured shorthold tenancy. England now has a single private tenancy: the assured periodic tenancy. Existing tenancies converted automatically on the day, with no surrender, no re-grant and no new agreements to issue.
New tenancies cannot be granted for a fixed term. A term purporting to create one has no legal effect, and attempting to impose one can itself attract a penalty. The tenancy runs periodically from the outset, with periods matching the rent period — and the rent period cannot be longer than a month, so the quarterly arrangements common on higher-value lets no longer work.
Tenants can leave on two months’ notice at any point, including in the first month. Landlords have no equivalent route: possession requires a ground under section 8, evidence, and in the two most common scenarios — selling, or moving in — four months’ notice that cannot be served in the first year, followed by a twelve-month ban on re-letting.
The document most landlords have missed
The requirement catching people out is the written statement of terms. For any tenancy granted on or after 1 May, the landlord must give the tenant a written statement setting out the terms of the letting, and it must be provided before the agreement is entered into — not handed over on move-in day.
The Schedule to the Assured Tenancies (Private Rented Sector) (Written Statement of Terms etc and Information Sheet) (England) Regulations 2026 lists eighteen categories that must appear, among them the landlord’s name and an address for service, the rent and how it is paid, how the tenancy can be ended, repairing and safety obligations including gas and electrical testing, and the tenant’s right to request a pet and to make disability-related adaptations.
In practice the statement and the tenancy agreement can be the same document — but only if the agreement actually contains all eighteen. A pre-May template will not.
Clauses that are now liabilities
Some of the standard furniture of an old AST is now inert. Fixed terms and break clauses do nothing. Contractual rent review clauses have no effect either, because rent can only be raised by a section 13 notice on the prescribed form, once every 52 weeks, with two months’ notice.
Others are worse than inert. A blanket “no pets” clause is overridden by the Act, and a “no DSS” or no-children restriction sitting in a signed agreement is evidence of a prohibited practice whether or not the landlord ever enforced it.
What it costs to get wrong
Local authorities can issue civil penalties of up to £7,000 for failing to provide the written statement before the tenancy begins, rising to £40,000 for the more serious offences in the Act. Tenants can separately apply for a rent repayment order of up to two years’ rent, which the Act extended from the previous twelve months, and they can do so without going through the council.
That combination is what makes template drift expensive. The exposure attaches to the tenancy, so a landlord who rolled the same defective document across a portfolio has repeated it on every letting.
What to do now
Landlords letting in England should pull their current template and check it against the statutory list rather than assume a supplier has updated it. The Landlord Alliance has a clause-by-clause breakdown of what a 2026 tenancy agreement must contain, including which clauses to strike out and which documents to serve alongside it.
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are unaffected. They operate separate regimes, and none of the above applies there.
Sources: Renters’ Rights Act 2025; the Assured Tenancies (Private Rented Sector) (Written Statement of Terms etc and Information Sheet) (England) Regulations 2026; National Residential Landlords Association guidance on creating an assured periodic tenancy. General information, not legal advice.